If a manual called Successful Meditation for the Slightly Neurotic and Manic Person Who Can't stop Thinking About What's For Dinner existed then I'd buy it. I'm a useless meditator. I can't sit in one place for longer than five minutes unless there's a good meal or book in front of me. The idea of meditation is attractive (it constitutes one of the 12 steps of recovery in Al Anon and AA), but when I've tried to do it as advised, I can't stomach the static silence that is involved. Plus, I can't often shut myself away in a room for 10 minutes, without the distraction of children or noise.

There is such a thing as on-the-move meditation, though, and my local park is the perfect place to do it. It is only a few hundred yards from my home and I walk or cycle through it daily. This morning, I sat with my youngest son on a bench atop a hill, him twanging the metal seat bars with his plastic spade, me looking over at the dogs and the runners working up a sweat in the sun.

I thought about how things had been harder this week than they have for a while. How my daughter says she hates me and always will; how R and I are competing with over-tiredness and feeling over-worked and not having enough time to do the things we enjoy together; how the cat has a cough that reminds me that he's actually pretty old in cat years, and that everything eventually dies.

As my son started to make noises about visiting the sandpit, we stood up, I took his hand in mine and we walked over to the path. I looked to my left and saw a huddle of buildings, some like giant icicles shimmering in the sun. All around them the arms of multiple cranes moved lethargically in the heat, building a new city skyline.

But in the near distance to my right, a single church spire poked out of the trees of a bordering street, and my eye was unable to spot anything modern at all. I felt I'd been transported back a century. I see these scenes every day, and yet they still make me feel so happy: the beauty of the future and the past in one vista, all in one sweep of a gaze.

And sometimes that is meditation enough. To look around me in the park and realise how lucky I am to have what I have, focusing only on what I see, rather than the things that I must do or that I have already done. Simple observations of the present are therapeutic, a great exercise in enjoying the here and now.

I didn't always love the park. I didn't really give it much thought when I first encountered it years ago. An estate agent showed me round my first house and he kept on mentioning its proximity to a good school. My daughter was still a babe in arms so I closed my ears to that. He made me look out of the bedroom window at the view of the park, with its wild meadowland and magnificent trees. I said: "Ooh, very nice," before moving on to the bathroom and wondering if I could live with a corner bath.

The park would never impress me, I thought. As a country girl, I imagined it would be a poor, boring cousin to the verdant landscape where I'd been raised, and which, in my teenage years, I had come to loathe: my passion for the city – throbbing motherland of grit and excitement – made my heart swell. I cared little about its green spaces. When I opened the door to my first home all those years ago, it was the downstairs loo, rather than the park, that had sold it to me.

But now the park is a place where I take niggling resentments, and shake them off like an itchy coat. If I'm alone, I often check to see that I am at a safe distance from everyone else before I shout if I'm angry, or fart if I'm happy, because the sky is big and it has no end to what it can take.

For the moment, the proper meditation will have to wait because I have realised that I can't do all the things that have been recommended to me. But I always have time for a walk in the park, with its trees, and its people and its peace.